Thursday, April 3, 2014

USAID’s adventures in covert action, the latest chapter

This
is quite a piece of reporting by Desmond Butler and colleagues at the
Associated Press.

It’s worth absorbing because it shows a little-known aspect
of U.S. policy toward Cuba and a little-known aspect of USAID’s work, which is
covert action plain and simple.

The essential facts are that USAID created ZunZuneo, a
Twitter-like information service for Cubans that operated by text message.The U.S. government’s involvement was hidden “to
ensure the success of the Mission.”(En silencio ha tenido que ser, as they
say.)Cuban subscribers registered for
the service, USAID gathered their personal data, and through interactions with
subscribers it ranked their political tendencies.For example, subscribers were asked whether
bands critical of the government should have been allowed to perform at the Juanes
concert.The idea was to build the
subscriber base by offering interesting news content, gradually to introduce
political content, and eventually to try to mobilize subscribers to political
activism so as to “renegotiate the balance of power between the state and
society.”

These were, in other words, “activities of the United States
Government to influence political, economic, or military conditions abroad,
where it is intended that the role of the United States government will not be
apparent or acknowledged publicly.”That
is “covert action” as defined in U.S. law (National Security Act of 1947).

Now I am not against covert action in principle, nor are
most governments regardless of what they say.But it’s a little rich for USAID to be engaging in covert action and
refusing to admit it, much less participating in the controls and oversight
mechanisms that Congress and the Executive have for that purpose.

Here’s what a USAID spokesman told the AP: “USAID is a
development agency, not an intelligence agency, and we work all over the world
to help people exercise their fundamental rights and freedoms, and give them
access to tools to improve their lives and connect with the outside world.In the implementation, has the government
taken steps to be discreet in non-permissive environments? Of course. That’s how you protect the practitioners and
the public. In hostile environments, we
often take steps to protect the partners we’re working with on the ground. This is not unique to Cuba.”

In other words, the Obama Administration’s position today
is that USAID programs like this are hunky-dory. It amazes me that USAID is employed in this
manner, that it doesn’t see it as a threat to its good, overt work in many
countries.Others can sort that out, I’ll
concentrate on Cuba.

The ZunZuneo program’s activities began and ended during the
Obama Administration, but I wonder if the program’s origin was in the Bush
Administration, which increased funding for Cuba political programs and started
seeking proposals for technology components in 2006.This request
for proposals is the first I know that focused on technology to deliver
information and to strengthen political opposition in Cuba.

The AP story quotes a USAID document that mapped Cuba’s
political terrain and labeled the “democratic movement” – i.e. the dissidents
on which USAID spends millions – as “still (largely) irrelevant.” Harsh, but true, and we should keep this from
Senators Menendez and Rubio.(To digress
a moment, this is not the first time that the U.S. government reached this
conclusion.Almost exactly 54 years ago,
this State
Department memo argued that there was “no effective political opposition”
and the “only foreseeable means of alienating internal support” was to “weaken
the economic life of Cuba” and eventually “to bring about hunger, desperation, and
overthrow of government.”)

So with the dissidents leading nowhere in USAID’s view, ZunZuneo
was a tool to generate effective political activism.

USAID isn’t very competent at acting like a junior CIA and running
covert operations in Cuba.Its
operations tend to be found out.Indeed,
the Cuban intelligence service tends to see them coming, as shown in this
2011 video.

But more important than that is USAID’s political
malfeasance.

Just as Alan Gross has cast suspicion on Americans who assist
religious institutions in Cuba on their own, unpaid by U.S. government
contracts, this program casts suspicion on people who have no U.S. government
connection and try to help Cubans gain access to information.Cuban citizens, not to mention the Cuban
intelligence service, will reasonably suspect that there’s a hidden U.S.
government hand in an offer of information or access to technology – or that
the offer is really bait for a future attempt to bring them into a political
program.

USAID’s program was disrespectful to Cubans.It is patronizing of USAID to refer to Cuban
citizens as “partners” when they don’t know that they are dealing with the U.S.
government.Our government should not be
operating under false pretenses with Cubans, as it did through Alan Gross and
now through ZunZuneo.And the U.S.
government has no business luring Cuban citizens into a social media operation
to gather information on their political views without their consent.It’s hard for the U.S. government to say that
Cubans need to find their own way and “determine their own future” when it is
trying not to assist, but actually to generate political activity.

USAID discredits genuine political opposition in Cuba, of
which there is plenty, of all shades, in many places, including inside the
system itself where many of Cuba’s most interesting and certainly most
consequential debates are raging today.Some of this debate is, believe it or not, encouraged by the
government.But when the government
wants to set a limit, it invokes national security and warns that the United
States is trying to “fabricate a political opposition.” If the DGSE hasn’t thanked USAID, it should do
so now.

It’s easy to find Cubans unhappy with their government.It’s hard to find one that wants to be
treated unwittingly as an object by ours.They deserve better, and since this is apparently the best we can do
after eight years of Bush and six of Obama, maybe they deserve to be left alone
by the U.S. government.